vista

I sadly missed this story last week but it bears further inspection. Charlie “The Animal” White wrote a piece “fact-checking” the claims that Vista is buggy, slow, and a big hassle. While I cannot agree that Vista is a sub par offering from Microsoft, I can unequivocally state that it’s good enough for the average user and no matter how much we whine and cry… Read More

HP denies that they are making an OS to rival Vista, but, they do acknowledge that they are developing software that would bypass some of its functions altogether. HP formed the “customer experience” group nine months ago in an effort to give customers a quick and easy alternative to certain applications. The team is focusing on touchscreen technology where users can watch movies… Read More

http://www.crunchgear.com/video/player.swf?movie=microsoft.flv
Here’s that commercial we told you about earlier – the first in the series of ads for Microsoft’s $300 million campaign to help prop up Windows Vista. I just grabbed it off my TV while watching the Giants/Redskins game.
While this ad doesn’t really tell us anything about Microsoft or its products, it does… Read More

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is launching a $300 million ad campaign starting September 4th. The ads will star none other than Jerry Seinfeld, who’s reported to be receiving about $10 million. Not bad, eh?
The campaign is being developed to combat the negative image that many consumers have about Windows Vista and also to finally push back against Apple’s… Read More

Microsoft has a blog about Windows 7 now. It’s called E7, and it’s aimed at people like us, people who scrutinize the development (or lack thereof) of Windows to the nth degree. It’s supposed to be a conversation, right, about how they’re making Windows 7. The blog will primarily be written by two senior project managers, along with occasional input from the rest of… Read More

The latest upgrade to WMC, codename Fiji, is finally official. We’ll try not to harp on Microsoft to bad about the Windows Media Center TV Pack, but honestly, that’s kind of hard as the pack isn’t what it was suppose to be. Missing is the DirecTV and H.264 video compression support. More importantly though, the good folks at Redmond choose not to allow home theater PC… Read More

A recent article in APC Magazine finds a marketing manager for HP detailing how business users are still able to order machines pre-loaded with Windows XP while making it appear that the OS sold was Windows Vista.
Jane Bradburn of HP Australia says,
“From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence. However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is… Read More

Apple’s success with the iPod, iPhone and Mac is finally starting to worry Microsoft, according to the company’s recently filed 10-K form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (10-K forms summarize a publicly traded corporation’s performance, as required by the SEC.)
In the filing, Microsoft says the following about a certain vertically integrated rival:
A… Read More

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Nobody would argue that Linux has an appreciable market share. They could however say that they have an appreciating share. Cause in fact they do. Since Microsoft launched Vista in January 2007, U.K. preinstalls of Linux have multiplied 28 times.
But unfortunately for Linux, 28 times a little is still a little. However, consider that pre-Vista, Linux was being shipped on only .1% of PC’s. Read More

Willcom D4 UMPC: Vista Home Premium performance from Jenn Lee on Vimeo.
Windows Vista gets a lot of stink for being too resource demanding, something this video here tries to dispel. This 12-minute video shows a Willcom D4 (1.33GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM) running Vista, going through various processes in order to put the tablet to the sword, so to speak.
As you might imagine, the… Read More

Okay, here’s what happened. Microsoft took a group of 120 individuals who “were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista” and who rated their perception of Vista at less than a five on a scale of one to ten. These people were shown a demo of what they thought was a new Windows OS called “Mojave” and this demo was… Read More

While I’m never the first to jump on Vista for this or that problem (I’m guessing it’ll be a great OS in a couple years), this is pretty dumb. Larger capacity solid state disks are in the works and, being more complicated internally, will require a more sophisticated controller. You don’t think about your hard drive controller that much, and that’s probably… Read More

Vista is great, honest.
Microsoft looks to be rolling out its “Vista isn’t so bad, see?” ad campaign, as this delightful little jpeg shows. You know how people used to think the world was flat, but then a bunch of explorers proved them wrong? Apparently Microsoft will try to demonstrate that Vista actually doesn’t stink on ice. Good luck with that.
Somewhat less… Read More

Bill Veghte from the Windows group at Microsoft sent out a nice big memo to those who still haven’t installed Vista in their enterprises and are waiting for some real improvement before they even consider it. His advice?
Windows Vista offers significant advances in security and productivity and we recommend that enterprises that have not yet deployed it should absolutely evaluate… Read More

According to the NYT Intel will not upgrade their 80,000 employee computers to Vista, at least according to an internal that is making everyone in the IT industry giggle like little girls. The IT staff at Intel found “no compelling case” for adopting Vista and that it will still use Vista in test scenarios in some departments.
What does this mean? Well, it will definitely mean… Read More

Since about 2002, the Department of Justice has had a special “Technical Committee” overseeing the development of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The committee’s main job was to monitor the implementation of the Microsoft-owned middleware products that get (or used to get) installed by default on new computers like Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN… Read More

Dell, in its infinite wisdom, will charge customers $20 to $50 to downgrade from Vista to XP. Only buyers of low-end Vostro PCs have to worry, though.
This is all because of Microsoft’s self-imposed June 30 end-of-life for Windows XP.
Says the shrill ComputerWorld:
Adding Vista Business to a Vostro 1000 notebook, for example, costs an additional $99 above the price with the default… Read More

The Pepper Pad 3, apparently not to be confused with the already-available Pepper Pad 3, has been spotted by AVING. This new version of the…um…board-like, lap-based, net surfing apparatus will feature Intel’s Atom processor and, according to AVING, “a 7-inch wide VGA touchscreen” and a Linux-based operating system. Read More

Cameron over at TweakTown.com got Windows Vista Ultimate up and running on the new Asus Eee 1000H. The Windows Experience rating is a lowly 1.0, held back by the graphics card, but the system seems to otherwise work. The installation apparently only took about 30 minutes. Bonus points for using AC/DC in the video. Read More